The present invention generally relates to wireless communication systems and particularly relates to improving receiver performance by accounting for non-Gaussian interference in a received signal.
As the popularity of wireless communication services increases, network service providers must find ways to service greater numbers of users. More efficient spectrum usage through improved modulation and signal processing provide one mechanism for increasing the number of users that can be supported with a finite radio spectrum, and more aggressive frequency reuse in cellular network planning provides another. By more aggressively reusing frequencies within a cluster of radio coverage cells, system operators increase the aggregate number of users that can be supported but such gains come at the expense of increased mutual interference between users, e.g., increased co-channel and adjacent channel interference between users.
Generally, such mutual interference is characteristically non-Gaussian in terms of its probabilistic distribution. As such, adequate cancellation of such interference poses challenges for the Interference Canceling (IC) receiver because conventional approaches to interference cancellation, suppression, etc., are based on modeling received signal disturbances as explicitly or implicitly Gaussian in nature.
Of course, acceptable communication receiver performance depends on more than just the ability to adequately suppress mutual interference. Other phenomena, such as time-varying multipath fading, complicate wireless communications and require special operations to ensure suitable receiver performance. Such operations typically include channel estimation and, particularly with widely dispersive communication channels, signal equalization. Conventional approaches to these signal processing operations are based on the assumption that such signal disturbances can be modeled as Gaussian in nature. Thus, the performance of such operations may be compromised where a non-Gaussian interference source is the dominant cause of received signal disturbance.